Tuning In: Jack Edwards pessimistic about NHL solution

Bruins fans won’t like this, but Jack Edwards expects the entire 2012-13 National Hockey League season to be wiped out by the lockout.

“Right now,” NESN’s play-by-play Bruins announcer said, “I think they’re going to bury it. I hope I’m wrong. As I often say on the air, ‘I have been wrong before.’ But I don’t see either side showing any signs that it wants to give.”

As far as Edwards is concerned, the owners are more to blame than the players for the impasse on signing a new collective bargaining agreement because they want the players to take a 24 percent pay cut after the NHL grossed a record $3.3 billion in revenue last season.

“That’s a nonstarter,” Edwards said, “for any employee of any business anywhere to hear that your bosses have just boasted of a seventh consecutive year of record revenues, then the next thing they say is we want you to roll back your salaries 24 percent, and it wasn’t like the players had won anything at the bargaining table. The owners wrote that CBA.”

If Edwards is correct about no hockey being played this season, it would be the second season without hockey in nine years.

“That’s the best way in the world that I can think of to turn people into NBA fans,” Edwards said.

“All I can tell you is it’s absolutely unanimous that the fans are heartbroken or outraged or both and that upsets me a ton.”

Edwards and Bruins analyst Andy Brickley worked a BC-BU hockey game for NESN last Sunday and Edwards will call a BU-George Washington basketball game at 1 p.m. tomorrow on NESN. But because Edwards and Brickley are considered seasonal employees, they have not been paid otherwise by NESN during the lockout.

Fortunately for Edwards, his wife, Lisa, has been able to pick up more work as a producer with the NFL Network and MLB Network. Edwards and his wife also own what he called a “microscopic production company” that has picked up extra business.

While Edwards wonders how he’ll pay for his son John’s final college semester, he has taken advantage of his time off to shuttle his other children back and forth to their hockey and basketball games. His 13-year-old daughter, Nina, is the only girl on her bantam hockey team in Edwards’ hometown of Simsbury, Conn.

“She loves body checking and she’s good at it,” Edwards said.

Edwards considers his 10-year-old daughter, Dagny, to be the Dennis Rodman of her basketball team because of her limited offensive skills and strong defense.

“Fortunately, she hasn’t taken a likening to tattoos yet,” Edwards joked.

Their 7-year-old son, Elijah, takes karate.

Edwards misses the rhythm of a hockey season, researching for games, attending the morning skates, mingling with the players, coaches and other media members while excitement builds for each game. The best part is the payoff at the end of each day, which — as he put it — is so unlike real life.

“Even though we’re not part of it,” he said, “we observe it very closely. You get to ride an emotional high or feel an emotional ebb and it reminds you that you’re alive and it’s a great, great feeling and a wonderful way to make a living, and I treasure it and I miss it a lot.”

Edwards has never felt closer to Bruins fans because he’s just as upset as they are over the cancellation of games.

“I wake up every morning,” he said, “absolutely baffled that they could take a train that’s never had more passengers or more valuable freight and run it off the tracks and into a canyon intentionally. It blows my mind.”

Edwards has a way of wording his comments like that. Quite often, he speaks like others might write. He credits his oratory skills to his parents, both former University of New Hampshire professors. His mother, Ruth, 84, taught music and his father, John, 85, was director of theater.

His role model was noted wordsmith and former Channel 5 sportscaster Clark Booth. As a young television and radio reporter in the late 1970s and early ’80s in Manchester, N.H., Edwards followed Booth’s career closely.

“I would yell at people if they even sneezed during a Clark Booth report,” Edwards recalled, “because I regard Clark Booth as the greatest writer in the history of New England television. I don’t think there’s even anybody in his league.”

Edwards compared working with Booth at Channel 5 for three years in the mid-1980s to Tyler Seguin learning tricks of the trade from Bruins veteran Mark Recchi.

Edwards also learned a great deal from Mike Lynch, whom he called the Carl Yastrzemski of Boston sportscasters.